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While Jupiter and Saturn have been stealing the headlines lately, this week on “The Cosmic Controversy Podcast,” I’m pleased to welcome planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel to talk about the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. They remain the largely forgotten gatekeepers to our outer solar system.


Renowned planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel and I chat about our solar system’s mysterious ice giant planets, Uranus and Neptune. There’s only been one flyby of these giant planets by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft back in the late 1980s. Hammel, who was part of the Voyager 2 science team, explains what that mission taught us about these objects and why we need to go back.

Intel PR rep Mark Walton unveiled the new chicken-warming KFConsole on Twitter on Tuesday, reassuring confused gamers that the KFConsole is real and not a hoax. The official KFC Gaming Twitter account also released a new video on Tuesday showing off the chicken-warming chamber.

“Yes, it’s real,” Walton tweeted. “Yes, it’s powered by Intel. And yes, it has a chicken warmer.” Walton also revealed that the Cooler Master is behind the unusual console.”


The fast-food chain unveils a real gaming console powered by Intel that keeps your fried chicken warm while you play video games.

[Editor’s Note: Independent security consultant Christopher Budd worked previously in Microsoft’s Security Response Center for 10 years.]

Analysis: To understand where the SolarWinds attackers are going next, and how to defend against them, look to the clouds.

The SolarWinds supply chain attacks are unprecedented in many ways. The attacks are sophisticated in execution, broad in scope, and incredibly potent in their effectiveness. But perhaps most notable is the unprecedented manner in which the SolarWinds attackers seem to be seeking access to cloud-based services as one of their key objectives.

“The mind-reading technology works in two stages. First an electrode is implanted in the brain to pick up the electrical signals that manoeuvre the lips, tongue, voice box and jaw. Then powerful computing is used to simulate how the movements in the mouth and throat would form different sounds. This results in synthesised speech coming out of a “virtual vocal tract”.”


The technology could eventually help those who have lost their voice to speak again.

An international research team lead by Aalto University has found a new and simple route to break the reciprocity law in the electromagnetic world, by changing a material’s property periodically in time. The breakthrough could help to create efficient nonreciprocal devices, such as compact isolators and circulators, that are needed for the next generation of microwave and optical communications systems.

When we look through a window and see our neighbor on the street, the neighbor can also see us. This is called reciprocity, and it is the most common physical phenomenon in nature. Electromagnetic signals propagating between two sources is always governed by reciprocity law: if the signal from source A can be received by source B, then the signal from source B can also be received by source A with equal efficiency.

Researchers from Aalto University, Stanford University, and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) have successfully demonstrated that the reciprocity law can be broken if the property of the propagation medium periodically changes in time. Propagation medium refers to a material in which light and waves survive and propagate from one point to another.